Friday, August 23, 2013

It’s sort of like Maggie’s warning about running out of other people’s money; sooner or later you also run out of part-time jobs and people who’ve ‘voluntarily” dropped out of the workforce or joined the ranks of the “disabled.”

University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan [asserts that] ObamaCare discourages hiring, discourages full time employment and discourages businesses from becoming large rather than small.

This is very murky, what’s really going on here?

Let’s have Big Guy himself bring some transparency to the situation; he’s on one of his Big Black Bus tours, addressing middle class issues, so this should be right up his alley.

“At some point, the government’s going to run out of money,” the president said.

No, wait a minute - he was talking about money for higher education, not unemployment:

Mr. Obama said the federal government and colleges have been in a type of financial arms race in recent years, with the government boosting its contributions and schools raising their prices.

“At some point, the government’s going to run out of money,” the president said.

Odd, that’s what some people have been saying about other government funded programs too; Obamacare, for example.

Butt I digress; what the heck’s really going on with unemployment? We’re in the middle of our 4th Summer of Recovery, and just recently pivoted to focus on JOBS! JOBS! JOBS!, how on earth can unemployment be going up?

It’s almost like we’re already running out of other people’s money. What could be going wrong?

Allow me to explain: In order to keep our summer of recovery 4.0 myth alive we’ve had to remove more and more people (7.5 million so far) from the denominator of the unemployment rate calculation. By doing so, we’ve inadvertently dropped our “labor participation rate” to 63% – the lowest in decades!

Because when you’ve established a trend of fewer and fewer people working, you get fewer and fewer people paying taxes to support a government that’s getting bigger and bigger and spending more and more of other people’s money.

In short: we have more and more “spenders” and fewer and fewer “other people.”

See? Economics is really pretty simple if you cut through all the crap.